Pope urban found his favorite passage from The Assayer in Galileo's parable about the song of cicada, which demonstrated the boundless creativity of God in the bounty of Nature. "Once upon a time, in a very lonely place," this story began,

There lived a man endowed by Nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime her raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed; and he observed with great admiration the happy contrivance by which they could transform at will the very air they breathes into a variety of sweet songs.

One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about on the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude. But realizing that if he had not chanced to meet the boy he would never have learned of the existence of a new method of forming musical notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to travel to distant places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.

As the man roved, the encountered song made by " a bowsawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood," by the hinges of a temple gate, by "a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet," and by the beating wings of wasps.

And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he knew how sounds were produced; nor would all his previous experiences have sufficed to teach him or even allow him to believe that crickets derive their sweet and sonorous shrilling by scraping their wings together, particularly as they cannot fly at all.

Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly existhe suddenly found himself once more plunged deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever, for having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needled drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.

This section of The Assayer delighted Urban with its graceful language and poetic conceit and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as man may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.

Until this year, I didn't read any non-fiction. But lately, it seems to be most of what I read. Gelileo's Daughter is a great non-fiction novel. Galileo was a fascinating person and his life and his works are wonderfully told in this well-written novel. It flows easily and it talks about Galileo, his family, his relationship with his daughters and son, his struggles with the religious views of the time and his discoveries. It's most definitely a worthwhile read.